Task

Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.

Shawn explains this in more detail:

You can actually see a couple areas where we’re using the Freebase music data publicly. First, in the structured refinements in search. If you search for lady gaga albums and scroll to the bottom to see “Album searches for Lady Gaga”. Also you can see videos clustered by topic in YouTube Topics and many of the topics are music-related.

It’s important to keep in mind that Musicbrainz is just part of the solution. It’s a pretty big part of Freebase music data and therefore its likely to be a pretty big component in these results but as you know the search results team at Google is pretty secretive about what all goes into the results page so even I can’t tell for certain when they’re using Freebase/Musicbrainz data for any given result.

I think it’s important that people don’t mistake this as a one-to-one relationship between Musicbrainz data and Google results because there are quite a few steps in between but there’s definitely a strong connection there and we really appreciate everything that the Musicbrainz community is doing and hope that Musicbrainz community continues to grow.

I find this tremendously exciting to hear, since I proposed a very similar thing to Google many years ago. While this idea was rejected back in the day, I’m excited to see that Google is now using our data for it searches. Every person who has ever contributed to MusicBrainz should be proud!

Thank you to everyone and thank you Shawn for shedding some light on this!

The 0.15 stable version was finally released today, with some new features and bug fixes since beta2. There were too many small changes to list, but here’s a partial changelog with the most user-visible ones:

Version 0.15 – 2011-07-17:

Added options for using standardized track, release, and artist metadata.

Added preferred release format support.

Expanded preferred release country support to allow multiple countries.

Added support for tagging non-album tracks (standalone recordings).

Plugins can now be installed via drag and drop, or a file browser.

Added several new tags: %_originaldate%, %_recordingcomment%, and %_releasecomment%

Changes to request queuing: added separate high and low priority queues for each host.

Tagger scripts now run after metadata plugins finish (#5850)

The “compilation” tag can now be $unset or modified via tagger script.

Today we released our first schema change update since NGS. This change is quite a radical one, as it merges both of our databases (“READWRITE” and “RAWDATA”) into a single database. For most users of the database, this probably won’t affect you, but you’re encouraged to run the upgrade process anyway. Here’s what you need to do:

Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.

Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.

Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm

Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE

Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change

Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.

Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff

Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.

Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.

This process may take a while, as it has to dump one database into another, and download a few extra changes to ensure slaves aren’t missing any data. The RAWDATA database should no longer be in use and you should be able to drop it, but waiting to see that everything is working well might be a good idea.

This schema change does not introduce any new data. For everyone else, here’s a list of what got fixed since the last release!